As I get older I notice how few truly original ideas there are in movies,
books, music and comics. Each generation of creators builds on the work
of their predecessors, takes ideas and techniques and adds their own
touches. It’s also surprising how often you discover that ideas you
thought of as revolutionary when you first encountered them are themselves
rehashed from earlier generations of artists.
This was especially true in the world of British comics. Indeed the
revitalisation of the British Comics scene in the late seventies owed a huge
amount to the wholesale adoption of ideas and concepts from popular culture,
most notably from the cinema. This applied especially to the titles
influenced by Pat Mills and John Wagner at IPC.
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| The Coburn inspired Major Eazy |
Battle, for example, took the trend for more realistic war films and the
popularity of anti-heroes in the mould of James Coburn or Clint Eastwood as its
inspiration. But adapted and developed those ideas to give us something
new and ultimately very special.
Action picked up every cinema trend the guys could find from Rollerball to
Jaws and even latched onto the then-current popularity of gang related pulp
fiction featuring various types of Yob from Skinhead to Hells' Angels.
The girl's comic, Misty would later owe a huge amount to the fiction of Stephen
King, films like Carrie and, I suspect, the Italian horror movie scene.
But while Mills and Wagner may have 'borrowed' ideas they always added their
own slant, developed the concepts, often adding what could be described as a
little bit of magic. That magic made the 'borrowing' forgivable. It
even added a little to the enjoyment as the reader could feel slightly smug
when they spotted the influences. An outright steal of a story from
another medium was actually very rare. But it did happen.
In the last post in this series, I left 2000 AD as it had just survived an
almost existential crisis. Difficulties with management over excessive
violence in the Inferno Strip, along with disappointing sales had led to a
decision to merge 2000 AD with its stablemate Starlord. While
Starlord had been the better selling of the two comics at the time, 2000 AD was
cheaper to produce and was better known by newsagents and so it was the title
that Head of IPC Youth Group, John Saunders decided should survive.
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| The Classic 2000AD line-up |
Indeed it not only survived, it thrived. The first post-merger issue,
Prog 86, cover dated 14 Oct 1978, featured possibly the strongest line-up of
strips yet to appear in the comic. Strontium Dog by T B Grover (John Wagner)
and Carlos Ezquerra along with the Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons Ro-Busters strips
came in from Starlord and joined Dredd by John Howard (Wagner again) and Brian
Bolland with another visceral and violent Belardinelli strip in the form of the
return of Flesh, the popular Dinosaur wrangling story, finishing off a very
strong line-up.
Artistically this set the standard for progs to come. Bolland
and Gibbons, with their clear lines and American influenced figures and
layouts, played well against the more stylistic and fluid images of
Belardinelli and Ezquerra. The stories were uniformly excellent, varied
and more clearly science fiction tales than some of the stories which had gone
before...
Just as important, for the future, was the arrival of Steve MacManus from
Battle, first as deputy and then as editor following the resignation of
Kelvin Gosnall. 2000AD had found a winning formula. There was no room for a
traditional sports strip at the time, indeed the closest we would see in the
next couple of years was Blackhawk, a story transplanted from Tornado when
2000AD absorbed that title with Prog 127.
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| Belardinelli at his weird best. |
A Roman Gladiator transported into space, Blackhawk was required to fight
alien opponents, with his adventures drawn, once again, by Belardinelli.
The strip is mainly notable for being one of the first written by Alan Grant,
but I'm not sure that it really qualifies as a sports strip, or, indeed, that
it belonged in a Science Fiction comic like 2000 AD.
It would be September 1980 (Prog 178) before the next true sports strip
would appear in 2000 AD. A Tom Tully idea, The Mean Arena, was described
like this in the first episode.
Street Football: The world’s most popular sport. A mixture of
Rugby, American Football, and Soccer. It is played in specially evacuated
towns and cities with each side stalking the other through the streets and
buildings therein.
In reality, there was very little in the set-up that came from either Soccer
or Rugby, this was American Football played on the streets. And the
set-up of the game was excellent, brilliantly conceived and with huge dramatic
potential. The game was easy to understand, each player had a clearly
defined role and a sensible reason to be visually distinctive. It also
had the potential for gimmicky team uniform designs and for the costumes to be
as visually exciting as Dredd or Strontium Dog. In other words this was
possibly the best set-up of any future sports strip seen in British
comics.
In Tom Tully, 2000AD had the perfect writer for Mean Arena. He had
brought the idea to Steve MacManus and had huge experience with sports
stories. Tully was a real professional, he appears to have had a
different attitude to many of the other writers and very clear career
priorities, Tully was in it for the cash. In an interview on the
"Everything comes Back to 2000AD" podcast, Pat Mills recalls that
Tully used to introduce himself to other writers as "Tom Tully, I make
more money than the Prime Minister" and that he once proudly boasted to
Mills that he could write two stories a day.
Tully was a throwback to the old days of British comics, but he was also
skilful enough to move his writing with the times. He'd written popular
stories for Action and Battle and his strips in 2000AD had held their own
against the writing of Mills and Wagner. But he had a special skill that
must have been important in the decision to accept his Mean Arena
idea. Tully had been a main writer on Roy of the Rovers and had
demonstrated the ability to write strips which kept a story interesting with
very little behind it.
Mean Arena started well enough, the first episode appearing in Prog
178. This was the first time 2000AD had featured a free gift, a badge
attached to the cover, since Prog 3. The issue also featured the start of the second
story by Mills and O'Neill in the series that would become Nemesis the Warlock
and the debut of the Wagner/Grant writing team on Strontium Dog. The
issue was completed with one of the closing episodes of the Judge Child saga
featuring and another strip allowing Belardnelli free reign to show his
abilities, Meltdown Man.
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| The Rest of the line-up of Prog 178. |
It was going to be difficult to stand out in line-up like that but the first
episode looked good. Steve McManus has said that nobody wanted to draw
the strip and that Steve Dillon had done a lot of design work on the costumes
etc. Art in the early episodes was by John Richardson, who would become known
for his work on slightly risqué strips like Amanda for the Sun newspaper or the
less subtle, Pussy Muldoon for D. C Thompson's Celebrity magazine. The
first episode, in particular, looked good, interesting layouts and a great use
of dark backgrounds meant that it still managed to hold its own against the
other strips. Indeed for a time it was the reason I read 2000AD.
The writing was well up to Tully's usual standards. As he moved his
story of Slaters Slayers and their star player Matt Talon from game to
game. A sub-plot, where Talon investigated corruption in the game and the
death of his younger brother moved slowly through the episodes.
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| Steve Dillon, too late to save the first series. |
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| Clunky and ugly art, a sad end for The first season of Mean Arena |
The quality of the strip held up for a time, but whether because of the
deadline problems that Steve McManus recalls as an ongoing issue for the
strip, or for other reasons, later episodes from Richardson lack the detail and
the interest of his earlier work. Some of those strips look rushed
and incomplete. Steve Dillon's art in Progs 199 and 200 promised much,
but by that time it was too late. Richardson returned for one final
episode in Prog 201 before the story ended in the next issue with art by Johnny Johnston that was
decidedly average.
The strip returned in Prog 218, Tom Tully still on hand but this time with Steve Dillon on the art from the beginning. More assured and with a greater sense of space, Dillon's early episodes looked better and more dynamic than anything that had gone before. Tully introduced new bad guys, the Malevolent Seven, one of whom looked suspiciously like Tharg, 2000AD's editor.
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| What might have been - dynamic art from Steve Dillon |
The issues up until Prog 223 were probably the best of the entire run. Steve Dillon brought something extra to the strip, but despite promise of a new episode the next Prog, there were two Mean Arena free issues to follow. What was worse, when the strip returned Dillon was missing. Instead the art was by Eric Bradbury. Bradbury was a great artist, one of the very best in British comics, but despite providing a great cover this was a mismatch. He simply did not suit the Mean Arena strip.
The strip meandered on for some time. Bradbury was replaced by the uninspiring 'M White' and Tom Tully by Alan Ridgeway. The stories were gimmick-ridden and forgetable, something Tully would not have allowed.
Whatever Mean Arena had had going for it had, by now, long since disappeared. When it finally came to an end in Prog 282 it was almost a relief.
It would be a long time before another sports strip found its way into 2000AD. Perhaps it
was the wrong time. The rest of the comic had moved
and had the unique, almost manic spirit that was the classic 2000AD. New strips, like Rogue Trooper and Ace Trucking Co. were on hand and fitted the spirit of the comic so much better.
Mean
Arena had been a good idea, it was very well conceived and Tully did a decent job on
the writing. But sub-standard art and a new writer meant that it
simply did not belong. Personally I'd enjoyed it, I've always
liked future sports stories and the small number of Dillon episodes had shown what a great strip it could have been. But, by the end I did not mourn its passing. I'd have forgotten about it but for a chance visit to Harry Hall's, a second
hand bookshop in Belfast well known to comic fans of a certain age from the
city.
It would have been about 1984 and I was working nearby, I popped in to find
something to read at lunchtime. I was attracted to a beat-up paperback by
Gary K Wolf. Its cover featured a man in futuristic armour and a long
knife, standing in a cityscape. The book was called 'Killerbowl'.
The blurb declared that it was about Street Football, an ultra-violent version
of gridiron football played in the near future on the streets of American
cities. I had to have it.
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| First UK Edition |
I read it in two sittings, after all I had to do some work that
afternoon. It was a strange book, written in the present tense like a
movie treatment. I always suspected that it may have been conceived as
such. But it was fast moving and entertaining. I really enjoyed it,
but with a little twist at the back of my mind that spoiled it just a little.
I was disturbed that someone had stolen ideas from a favourite comic
strip. It was so similar. All the details of the game were the
same. The names of the various positions and even the basic plot were too
close for comfort. Sure Gary Wolf had transported the game to the USA and
changed the name but this was 'The Mean Arena'.
And then I checked the publication date. 1976, a full four years
before Mean Arena had been written.
I've always known that comics 'borrow' ideas from other mediums.
2000AD was no stranger to this. A number of early future shocks bear
great resemblance to classic science fiction stories of the forties and fifties
and at least one series borrowed heavily from the ideas of well-known Belfast
Science Fiction writer James White. Even the excellent Halo Jones Book 3
appears to have used some ideas from Joe Hademan's Forever War.
But those writers, in general, used the ideas they borrowed as jumping off
points for story developments or as background. This is the way writers
have operated forever. But there had nothing quite as blatant as this in
any comics I had seen. The only real changes I could detect were the
changing of names, the shift of location to the UK and the transformation to a
strip that Tully hoped he could turn into a semi-regular feature of
2000AD. Simply put the entire set-up of the game and the general overarching
plot were too similar to be coincidence.
Mean Arena, as far as I could see was a straight, uncredited, adaptation of
the novel Killerbowl.
Editor, Steve McManus remembers Tully bringing the idea to him. In the
new edition of Thrill Power Overload he recalls a conversation about a street
football game played in Holland. Tully proposed moving the game to
the future and developing it into a future sport.
Holland does indeed have a tradition of organised street football, but that
is soccer and the idea that someone could have developed that into such a
similar game as the one described in Killerbowl is inconceivable.
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| Cover of the US edition, I think we fared better. |
|
Tully may have felt under pressure. 2000AD was developing an identity
all its own, Mills and Wagner had caught a tone that appealed to the comics’
loyal readership. They were getting a mixture of the regular fans of the
British weeklies and the American Comics fans who had become somewhat snooty
about Battle, Lion or Victor.
Tully's style was not, it probably appeared to him, what was wanted
anymore. Perhaps it was desperation to hold on to a market for his
writing, perhaps it was just too easy. I've no evidence he ever did
anything similar before or since.
Mean Arena failed as a strip, it had all the elements it needed to
succeed. The most coherent set-up of any future sports comic strip I've
ever read. A dramatic plot and good characters. In the end it
probably failed because it was in the wrong comic at the wrong time with the
wrong artist. But perhaps ultimately it failed because Tom Tully was
working with someone else's concepts and someone else's ideas and he never
quite got a handle on just how to make them work.
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| Gary's breakthrough book. |
Killerbowl, the novel, may not have been a huge success at the time. I certainly
had not heard of it before picking up my old second-hand copy. Wolf would
have to wait for his Roger Rabbit books for his big successes. But
it is without doubt one of the best Future Sports yarns about and has built up
a loyal following since its publication. It takes a few moments to get
past the unusual present-tense style, but after that this is
the book
for the sports fan who also likes science fiction. And any 2000AD fans
who read Mean Arena, its well worth a look at what I am almost certain was the source material for the strip.
I contacted Gary K Wolf, who tells me that he is working on updating the Killerbowl book. The new version will be called Street Lethal and will be set in 2051-2052. He still thinks it would make a '
killer' comic-book and I tend to agree.
I let him read a late draft of this article and he sent the following message:
I read Mean Arena when the strip was reprinted in comic
book form. A fan alerted me to the
rip-off. I had to track down copies from
rare comic dealers and pay a hefty price to read the plagiarized version of my own work.
Oddly, this is not the first time somebody
"borrowed" the plotline and characters from Killerbowl. In the late '80's, a fan wrote me asking if I
had any involvement in the MOVIE version of Killerbowl. I told him no since there was no movie
version of Killerbowl. He told me to check out an obscure Italian science
fiction movie, the name of which I've forgotten. I tracked down a VHS copy and watched the
film. Sure enough, the first third of the movie was a direct rip-off of
Killerbowl. The second third of the film
ripped off the plotline from my second science fiction novel A Generation
Removed.
To complete the triple play,
the third third of the movie stole the
plotline from my third science fiction novel The Resurrectionist. I grudgingly give snaps to the Italian film
team for making a somewhat coherent movie out of three completely dissimilar
stories. I looked into suing, but my
entertainment attorney told me the trial would have to take place in Italy,
would undoubtedly last for months, and, even though I would certainly prevail,
the fly-by-night production company would be long gone with all my lira. Instead, in my own small manner of protest,
I've sworn off pasta for life.
If you believe that imitation is, indeed, the sincerest
form of flattery, I am possibly the most
flattered writer I know.
Gary K. Wolf
Creator of Roger Rabbit
You can find Gary's books on this Amazon.co.uk page.
If you have not read parts 1 & 2, here are links to the previous parts:
Part 1
Part 2
